Anybody Bothering with 4.0?

I presume there are a few RPG players out there, so I figured I'd ask about whether anyone was interested in D&D 4.0 or not.

As for myself, I'm not sold on it, but one of the FLGS' I know it really trying to get me to show up for D&D Day for the revised version of Keep on the Borderlands.

--Mike L.

Can't say I care a whole lot. I GM Cthulhu 2x/month, and occasionally do one-shots of indie stuff, but fantasy anything I find pretty boring these days.

I'm a little curious if they can pull off some of the system tweaks without making it seems like a tabletop Wow clone. But I'll probably just flip through the book instead of buying it. I'm the RPG evangelist, so if I don't push for it, no one I interact with will especially miss it.

When I look at the stuff for 4th edition (please stop calling it 4.0, this isn't some bit of software), I find myself looking back at 2nd edition... and wondering why we bothered with 3rd edition at all.

My friends and I played the heck out of 3/3.5. But there's a reason I'm now a boardgamer. What I grasped of the new edition (only from hearsay) is that the new edition is simpler (if not euro-fied) which given the rules density of the 3rd edition was an obvious thing to do. It was also said that they added stuff which was thought of as being trivial before, like making the Diplomacy skill more vague or generally giving more decision power to the GM, which I assume was only included to keep this anal retententive type of role-playing gamer in check. Still I thought one of the latest 3.5 books "Races of the Wild" lead a new way in offering less but more filigreed (if that word makes sense here) rules as prestige classes, and I hope that way was continued into the new edition.

I believe 3, and 4, are excellent directions for the series to take.

2 was an absolute mess and 3, later 3.5, cleared that up and made the game internally consistent. That was a Good Thing(tm.) 4 is cleaning things up further can concentrating more on tactics.

D&D is getting back to it's roots: miniature combats. That's how the game started and that's what it's rules are evolving back towards. Again, that's a good thing. By turning D&D in to a tactical mini based combat system they capture both worlds: the tactical rules lawyers AND the roleplayers. Why the roleplayers? Because you can tack roleplaying on to ANYTHING. Thus by concentrating on the tactical system they have a good set of rules and their other market, the roleplayers, can still get by.

Further, it's not realistic assume they are done. They will continue to reboot and make core changes to the system. They have to to continue to grow their revenue. People have to buy for them to make money. There are more players than DM's, thus you have more player supplements than DM supplements. Sometimes they reboot the entire line and thus gain the opportunity to resell all of the core rules all over again.

Finally, let me point out that no one is forcing any of you to buy anything. Pick the rules you like and use your imagination. Create your own classes & monsters & treasures. The core books and a little time to think & play are all you need.

I'll definately be playing (and possibly Gming) some 4.0 but my days of buying 12 books are long past.

My favorite systems right now are Warhammer for its setting , simplicity and brutality and Spirit of the Century for narrative quality and inovative gameplay.


BTW should RPG be a catagory unto itself on the Forums? I was going to bring this up earlier but it slipped my mind.

Steve"RPGer"Avery

Steve--

I'd asked about that, and was told that the NetNanny's of the world will block F:AT if RPGs and computer games are in there explicitly. That's why we've got this vague area to muck around in.

You know, while I'm not that fond of the progression from 3.0 to 4.0, I can see how it will work as an RPG system. I guess my main complaint is that it's changed so much that even calling it 4.0 is a bit tame compared to all of the changes involved. If the game had been called something other than D&D 4.0 or maybe something like D&D Minis and Tactics, I wouldn't have minded so much.

As for what I'm interested in right now, there's that long standing 3.0 campaign I'm in (I'm the obligatory Cleric, and I've just acquired a Wizard to play too). However, I've been reading up on GURPS: Traveller, since I've felt the old SF RPG pull. And don't even talk about the ton of MERP stuff I have sitting around....

--Mike L.

Schweig! wrote:

My friends and I played the heck out of 3/3.5. But there's a reason I'm now a boardgamer. What I grasped of the new edition (only from hearsay) is that the new edition is simpler (if not euro-fied) which given the rules density of the 3rd edition was an obvious thing to do. It was also said that they added stuff which was thought of as being trivial before, like making the Diplomacy skill more vague or generally giving more decision power to the GM, which I assume was only included to keep this anal retententive type of role-playing gamer in check. Still I thought one of the latest 3.5 books "Races of the Wild" lead a new way in offering less but more filigreed (if that word makes sense here) rules as prestige classes, and I hope that way was continued into the new edition.

Schweig, I don't think I quite follow. Are you saying 3.x had too many rules around? I remember 1.0 and 2.0 quite well, and those were incredibly unwieldy. Now, the initiative being back with the DM, I'd quite agree; the non-imaginative DM probably couldn't handle winging it like 1.0 and 2.0 would require all too frequently. 3.0 does provide explicit stuff on what to do when, but I guess being old school, I never took it as gospel.

--Mike L.

I dunno... having played all the iterations of D&D I sincerely believe that 3.5 is as good as it gets.

Getting me to believe that 4th Ed is actually an improvement to the core ruleset as opposed to just being a purely financially motivated maneuvre is a damn hard sell.

This is just Wizards digging up a new well 'cause the other one ran dry.

That's exactly what people said about 3.5 vs 3rd edition, though.
My biggest beef with 3rd edition was the fact that it heavily encouraged powergaming, but was insufficiently equipped to handle it - How often do you really have an 'epic' fight that lasts several rounds in 3.5? It has been my experience with any sort of optimized play that there is no middle ground of difficulty, but rather a "we're overkilling them or they're overkilling us" scenario. As far as I can tell, 4th edition goes a long way toward fixing that.

D&D may have been the first and most popular role-playing game, but it was definitely never the best. Way too complicated. Too much rules-speak is bad for immersion, leaving a bunch of rules lawyers to sit around wrestling with semantics and game balance. I played the hell out of AD&D 1.0 and gave 2.0 a try, but always found better games to play, either easier or more fun or both. After more than two decades of role-playing, I am absolutely convinced that the best way to play is to get a reasonably user-friendly system and then play with a focus on actual role-playing, or at least story-telling.

I reluctantly gave 3.0/3.5 a try several years ago. It was very organized compared to all previous versions of AD&D and D&D, but still very complex. Combat was meatier, but that's not an entirely good thing for a war of attrition game like AD&D, and works much better for a simpler and more violent system like BRP.

I won't bother with 4.0. I don't begrudge somebody for trying to make more money off of Dungeons & Dragons, but I've got entire innovative game systems in my collection that I haven't had the chance to play yet, like All Flesh Must Be Eaten, Feng Shui, and The Dying Earth.

Also, I have discovered that my all-time favorite way to play D&D is on the computer. Specifically, the PC game Temple of Elemental Evil was great, once I downloaded the patches, and it's gotten even better with the mods. They took one of the greatest adventures written for 1.0 and upgraded it to 3.5, and it's really fun once you have a computer to handle all the complicated details like Attacks of Opportunity. Plus the graphics and the music and the voice actors all contribute so much to atmosphere, while a typical tabletop game of D&D is practically the enemy of atmosphere, with the nattering rules lawyers and the Monty Python jokes.

I still enjoy tabletop role-playing. I am currently running a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and my last major rpg campaign was a Legend of the Five Rings game that lasted for over three years. I just think that I'm done with Dungeons & Dragons.

I only moved up to 3rd from 2nd because my group at the time (mainly the DM who was into the RPGA scene) insisted. I just didn't see a reason to learn a new ruleset and buy new books when we always had fun playing 2nd. Later during 3rd's run the group started to flounder so when 3.5 came out and they were switching to that I bailed. Now I'm more interested in All Flesh Must Be Eaten and indie rpg's, but honestly I haven't played anything since GMing a Buffy campaign three years ago. I'm more into the RPG-like boardgames now I guess.

So the answer is no, I'm not bothering with 4.0.

I haven't put on my robe and wizard hat in about fifteen years, and I'm probably not going to start now. So that's a "no."

mikelawson wrote:

Schweig, I don't think I quite follow. Are you saying 3.x had too many rules around? I remember 1.0 and 2.0 quite well, and those were incredibly unwieldy. Now, the initiative being back with the DM, I'd quite agree; the non-imaginative DM probably couldn't handle winging it like 1.0 and 2.0 would require all too frequently. 3.0 does provide explicit stuff on what to do when, but I guess being old school, I never took it as gospel.

--Mike L.

I don't know about edition 1 or 2, and the 3.5 (not so much 3.0) rules surely were organized very well. But I think they were just too much stuff to fiddle with. In fact during our last campaign I tried to keep my character as simple as possible using only the PHB and the magic items from DMG, and I enjoyed the game more and I found my character was more unique than some of the charcters my friends built who used like four books or more and combined classes at will. And I killed the penultimate boss alone.

Schweig! wrote:

mikelawson wrote:

Schweig, I don't think I quite follow. Are you saying 3.x had too many rules around? I remember 1.0 and 2.0 quite well, and those were incredibly unwieldy. Now, the initiative being back with the DM, I'd quite agree; the non-imaginative DM probably couldn't handle winging it like 1.0 and 2.0 would require all too frequently. 3.0 does provide explicit stuff on what to do when, but I guess being old school, I never took it as gospel.

--Mike L.

I don't know about edition 1 or 2, and the 3.5 (not so much 3.0) rules surely were organized very well. But I think they were just too much stuff to fiddle with. In fact during our last campaign I tried to keep my character as simple as possible using only the PHB and the magic items from DMG, and I enjoyed the game more and I found my character was more unique than some of the charcters my friends built who used like four books or more and combined classes at will. And I killed the penultimate boss alone.

Maybe the reason why I like 3.0 is because that's how we play: our group has been on the same campaign since 2000 or so, and we've only used the three core rulebooks. That's not to say that I don't have other ones lying around, since it's interesting to read through what people do for game world enhancement (and I'm a supplement hog in my past life). That said, the core rulebooks are pretty much all we roll with.

--Mike L.